what wecall painting

Digital creations contain a strange indifference, one could even say ‘falseness‘, in the way they appear. Where they seem to be is not where they actually ‘are‘. Or not just there. For everything digital is genuinely both polymorphic and multi-locational. It can be present simultaneously at very different locations. It has multiple addresses and multiple architectures for its appearance. It does not recognise the distinction between copy and original and it refuses to be defined by the carrier for its own existence. Digital works go either to where a particular infra-structure enables their appearance or where they can be temporarily and metaphorically fixed in the form of a concrete object. Programs determine a visualisation and materialisation of data that is generated by yet more programs and make it clear that everything that we see could also be different.

However, this realisation presupposes a different understanding of the ‘white cube’. For digital artefacts, the neutralised exhibition space takes on the role less of a facilitator for an idealised viewing of the work, and much more that of a reflection on the media processes constituting these ‘works‘. For what is to be done, if what is presented on the wall, in the room or on our screens conceals its origins? If it dedicates itself to running the gamut of a multiplicity of interpretations that ultimately reject all interpretations celebrating generative programs. For this reason Cermâ aims to always do both.

Here, laying out a trail through the secular origins of digital processes and making the simulations ‘real’ and then, within the sacred walls of modernism, converting these traces into a well-tuned appreciation and analysis of their conditions. Jeremy Bailey has irony on his side. He produces an art that seems to appear both on and through the movements of his body. Yet this achievement exists only in the technological appearance of his body as digital performance. It is within the image space of the software that forms first mutate in this, his epiphany-like technological materiality. Irrefutable, random. From the outside, we view this ‘second body’ art and observe that it can only be understood as a commentary on Bailey’s own commentaries, who in turn claims to operate in a strictly post-modernist sense and with his art ‘everything’ is now ultimately possible. He celebrates the increasingly plebeian nature of painting with the aid of the same technique that produces its essential inability to be grasped either literally or metaphorically. All this takes place exclusively on and against the ‘backdrop’ of the screens.

Jeremy Rotsztain und Andreas Nicolas Fischer exhibit elegiac and monumental two-dimensional pictures. Yet here too, the central gesture refers to the interior of the computer that takes all the decisions about what we once called a ‘picture‘. Every creation seems to be a mere reference to what it is happening in the computer’s interior. And, as with all references, the reading of these supplies us with information about life in the ‘cognitive’ depths of the machine. This is the place where, in one instance, algorithms perform a Dionysian action disfiguration of blockbuster films producing their expressionist paint effects, whilst in another the similarity principles of Gestalt are used to produce a purely mathematical ‘composition‘ and realise its complex patterning of printing ink.